Louisiana taxpayers don’t really know that their hard-earned money ends up paying their local newspapers to serve as public relations mouthpieces for their local school board members, city council members and police jurors.

For me, this all comes to mind after news broke that Politico, Reuters, the Associated Press and other news agencies took millions of federal taxpayer dollars to pimp for liberal politicians and Deep State bureaucrats.

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This is a topic I have written about over at RVIVR, but not so much on The Hayride.

I’ll take you back 22 years to my first full-time job, where I was a reporter in North Louisiana. I was young, idealistic, and determined to report the good and the bad.

I won’t mention the name of the city or the parish, but I will say that my job was to cover the parish government. I attended and wrote about all police jury meetings and reported anything and everything parish government related.

My first day my employer asked me to always put the local police jurors and the local parish government in the best possible light. Our paper, I learned, was the official parish journal. We published, as the Louisiana Secretary of State’s Office specifies, “all minutes, ordinances, resolutions, budgets and other official [government] proceedings.” Basically, we’re publishing the legals.

City councils and school boards have the same arrangement with their local papers.

In exchange, the paper got a generous amount of money in advertising revenue. To me, the amount was never explicitly explained, but during my 10 years in newspapers I noticed that editors and publishers panicked and popped a lot of antacids once a year when this arrangement was up for renewal.

This is a perfect way for newspapers to make money. This is also a perfect way for local government officials to blackmail newspaper reporters and editors into giving them flattering coverage week after week, year after year.

My employer’s admonition to me on my first day went over my head. In college, my journalism professors stressed that journalism was a calling, and I was to look out for the public’s best interests and never suck up to elected officials.

As I soon learned, the people who run newspapers see it more as a business than they do a watchdog on the government. And I can understand and appreciate that, yes, newspapers are a business. With that said, members of the public, if they haven’t figured it out already, need to know that quid pro quos exist in the news industry. And that might explain why alternative media outlets and citizen journalism has flourished in recent years (of course, legacy media’s liberal bias also has a lot to do with that, but that’s for another column).

At these police jury meetings, I witnessed nine jurors behave like appalling human beings. They bickered like children. They said spiteful things to one another. The articles that I submitted documented most of it…if I thought it affected the public in some way. The quotes I recorded with my old microcassette recorder and then transcribed were particularly colorful. I wanted the voters to know that, on-the-job, this was how their elected officials behaved.

My editor asked me to edit out certain things if he found them not germane to the story. I complied. Still, I (mostly) told the good and the bad.

Police jurors were furious that my articles weren’t positive write-ups about them or assisting their reelection efforts. They admitted it at public hearings. They gave me nasty glares as they lectured me for documenting the things that they said and did, again, at PUBLIC forums.

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Jurors retaliated and cancelled our status as the official parish journal. They awarded it to a lesser-known competitor, which functioned more like a newsletter than it did a newspaper.

That was more than 20 years ago. Part of me has always felt a tad bit guilty, but my employer stood by me and my journalism.

To this day, there is no proposed local tax increase that a local newspaper in Louisiana won’t endorse, even if it puts a massive burden on their readers’ bank accounts. Newspaper publishers are skittish about writing negative articles about their local public-school systems or city or parish governments.

In one instance, a reporter I know submitted an article about rampant bullying taking place in the local schools. The local school superintendent got wind of it and threatened not to renew the paper’s official parish journal contract. The newspaper did not publish her article. Negative news stories are not to be tolerated. The reporter told me that she almost got fired over that incident. She soon quit the business altogether.

Under these arrangements, the community’s best interests are not served.

As more and more people cancel their newspaper subscriptions and get news from alternate media, I have heard of efforts to do away with these kinds of “official parish journal” arrangements. The idea is for local governments to publish their own legal documents online, on their official government websites.

This would save taxpayers a lot of money. Newspapers would likely suffer financially for it, but such a circumstance might force editors and publishers to finally start looking out for their own communities’ best interests. Who knows, they might end up selling more newspapers.

Newspaper publishers, of course, have a lot of sway at their state capitals and lobby against such proposals.

Which begs the question everyone should ask as they decide which media to peruse:

What outlets truly look out for the public’s best interests?

The most recent list of official parish journals throughout Louisiana is available on the Secretary of State’s website. The paper I worked for 20 years ago, in case you wondered, never regained its status as the official parish journal.

Local politicians are spiteful indeed.

Special thanks to Warhammer’s Wife for proofreading this story before publication to make certain there were no misspellings, grammatical errors or other embarrassing mistakes and/or typos. Follow Warhammer on Twitter @Real_Warhammer or on Facebook. Read Warhammer’s stories on RVIVR by clicking here.